While competitors like Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) are cranking out revolutionary (if disputed) personal computing products, Microsoft’s (MSFT) flagship, the Windows OS, appears stodgier every year. But the company’s dedicated devices — Xbox Live, the Zune media player — verge on brilliant. What’s with the disparity, and what will it mean for Redmond?

That’s the question posed by former Microsoft VP body part Brass in a February 4th New York Times editorial. Brass is mostly a Redmond apologist: “at worst,” he says, Microsoft is a “highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist.” But he acknowledges that something is amok with the state of innovation in this, the technology company with perhaps the largest global footprint of any.

Read more: http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10005157/is-microsofts-generation-gap-killing-its-creativity/